Sixth Sunday of Easter - May 22, 2022

30:37 It is good to be back at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. I always appreciate the warm welcome and hospitality of this place. I'm a Southerner. I'm originally from Atlanta, and my gratitude to the session for heating the city up to 90 degrees this weekend as a sign of welcome. But grace and peace to all of you, and it's good to be with you in worship. Let us ask the Spirit for God's wisdom. Let us pray. O God, let us hear what you want us to hear, so that we may be who you want us to be, and do what you want us to do. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

31:31 Before the Apostle Paul was Paul, he was known as Saul. And when he was a young man, he was a kind of religious terrorist who thundered up the Damascus Road, seething threats and violence and murder, intending to destroy the early Christian movement. The reason he wanted to destroy the early Christian movement was because he believed that the Christians were trying to dismantle a wall that should never, ever come down. the wall between Jew and Gentile. But on the way up the Damascus road, as you know, he encountered the risen Christ, who said, why are you persecuting me, Saul? Who are you? I am Jesus whom you persecute. And then he said, Saul, I am about to do something dramatic in your life.

32:29 I am going to take away your ministry of violence. and make you an ambassador of peace. I'm going to turn you into a missionary in my name to the Gentiles. Paul never got over that in fact in Ephesians we have an effusive description of what that experience was like because for the first time in his life he glimpsed something of the size of God's love the breadth and the length the height and the depth and in this hymn-like passage we almost can't even diagram the sentences because the clauses just tumble out with awe and wonder. Listen.

33:23 For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that according to the riches of God's glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through God's Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith as you are being rooted and grounded in love, I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to God, who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, To God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

34:31 This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. In one of his wonderful sermons, the Presbyterian minister, novelist, and essayist Frederick Buechner remembered a day when he and his wife were driving home and they stopped by a convenience store to pick up a few groceries. They were in a bit of a rush, so they took their grocery list and they tore it in half, and Buechner took one half and went to one side of the store, and his wife took the other half of the list and went to the other side of the store. And as soon as they were separated, Buechner remembered something they left off the list. So he leaned up over the cereal boxes and the cake mixes, and he shouted at his wife on the other side of the store, hey, don't forget the heavy cream.

35:25 She got up over the pampers and the paper towels and said back to him, all right, but don't you forget you're trying to be on a diet. And Buechner said, well, hey, you only live once. It was then when he said you only live once that this thing happened that broke for a moment through the crust and through the deafness. The woman at the cash register who had been overhearing the exchange, her face lined with weariness, her hair soaked with perspiration, when Buechner said, hey, you only live once, she leaned over the chewing gum and the lifesavers and said, don't you think once is enough?

36:09 It was, said Buechner, a mild jest, and I laughed a little bit, and my wife laughed a little bit, and the guy stocking the shelves with groceries laughed a little bit. But underneath the humor, I heard a cry. I heard a woman saying, people come and people go. I'm tired of them. I'm tired of them. I'm tired of myself. I'm tired of my life. I'll plug my way all the way to the end, but when the end comes, I won't complain. Once is enough. Buechner said, I'm a minister, and in my soul, I heard the joyful voice of Jesus saying, I am the resurrection and the life. And she rang up the shampoo and said, Once will be enough. Thank you. Now I think all of us hear exactly what Frederick Buechner heard that day.

37:05 We hear it in the hum and weariness of everyday life. We hear it from our friends and colleagues. We hear it even in our own souls as we wrestle with pressures and demands. And it wouldn't be human if we didn't open ourselves up to life and at some point find ourselves overwhelmed by it. Several years ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked the British theologian David Ford at Cambridge if he would write a book for lay people in the Church of England The archbishop wanted David to write a simple, clear, easy-to-understand book about what is the gospel and what is the Christian life. Because the archbishop was concerned that in a secular society, even people who belong to the church sometimes forget what the gospel is and what the joy of the Christian life might be.

38:10 David Ford agreed to write the book, and in preparation for the book, he decided he wanted to interview a lot of lay people in the Anglican church. So he gathered them in fellowship halls and church basements, and he asked them about their lives and about their faith and about their doubts and struggles. And he said he was surprised, because at almost no point did any of these lay people use any religious language. They never talked about faith or hope or sin or grace or salvation. None of the big theological words. In fact, said Ford, the one word that I heard more often than any other was overwhelmed. They were overwhelmed by schedules and calendars and busyness, by parenting and jobs and computers and politics and social media and conflict. They were absolutely overwhelmed.

39:18 And David Ford said, if I'm going to write a book that describes the gospel for today, I'm going to have to address the issue of being overwhelmed. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has been writing about that. He says it's a characteristic of our lives now that we're overwhelmed, and it's not simply that there's change happening. We're all equipped to handle a reasonable level of change. It's the rate of change, what he calls the acceleration of change. The change comes at us so fast now that we feel like we're standing on a slippery slope. the Bible by the way knows about this business of being overwhelmed you may remember one of the psalmists says save me oh God the waters are rising up to my neck it's a powerful image suddenly the floodwaters have come and gradually they're rising higher and higher until they threaten to inundate the psalmist you know it used to be I would read that psalm and I would I think it was talking about dramatic moments and heroic figures like martyrs or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or maybe the heroes in Ukraine.

40:37 It is talking about them, but it's also talking about Monday morning and Thursday afternoon, about simply putting one foot in front of the other and trying to live life today. It wouldn't be human if we weren't open to the pressures and occasionally feel overwhelmed.

41:01 Tilly Olson was a woman who in the 1930s worked as a waitress and as a maid and as a meat carver, but she was also a great American writer who recorded the experiences of working people during the depths of the Depression. One of her best-known essays is called I Stand Here Ironing. And in the essay, Tilly is standing at the ironing board, a single mom, the iron moving back and forth over a dress. But she's not thinking about her ironing, she's distracted. Because she has just received word from the school that they want a parent-teacher conference about her teenage daughter. The girl, they said, is troubled. The girl is in trouble.

41:55 and the girl causes trouble. And Tilly is overwhelmed by her inadequacies as a mother and the struggles of her daughter. And she writes in the essay, She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was no work. There were years that she had care that she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness, curly hair, and dimples. She was slow, where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud love. We were poor, could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother. I was a distracted mother.

42:51 There were other children pushing up and demanding. My wisdom came too late. And then she ends the essay with what can only be described as a prayer. Only help her to know, help make it so that there is a cause for her to know that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron. Oh God save me, the waters are coming up around my neck. Oh God save my daughter, the waters are coming up around our necks.

43:31 Now I am here this morning to preach the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And in some ways I wish that I could say to you that the good news of the gospel is that when we are in the waters and they are about to inundate us and we are overwhelmed, that what God does is to pluck us out of the flood and put us on dry ground safe. Sometimes that does happen, but that was not Paul's experience. When he was overwhelmed by the situation with the Gentiles, God didn't pluck him out. God drove him deeper in. But as he did, an amazing thing happened. He opened up a window and let Paul see the size of God's love. I want you to know, he wrote later, the length and breadth, the height and the depth of God's love.

44:38 I want you to be filled up with the fullness of God as I was. In other words, God didn't eliminate Paul's overwhelmness. He overwhelmed his overwhelmedness. It happens, you know, if we're alert to it, we can see God breaking through with fullness all around us. This is the season of commencements and graduations in colleges and universities. Just last weekend, my wife and I had the privilege of going to the commencement at the George Washington University in D.C. and proudly watching one of our granddaughters graduate. One of the speakers there said a particularly provocative thing or two, and after the ceremony, I asked my granddaughter what she thought about it. She looked blankly at me and then confessed that all the students were actually joking and talking with each other.

45:37 They weren't paying any attention to the ceremony whatsoever. She had no idea what the speaker had said. It took me back to my days at Emory University where the way we did commencement was that all of the graduates would be in the quad, grouped by schools. the college, the medical school, the law school, the business school, the theological school, the nursing school, on and on, thousands of graduates. There would be a speaker's stand at the front with not only a lectern, but with bleachers on either side where the faculty sat, which meant that the faculty actually looked at the students during the commencement, and we could see what they were doing. It was not pretty. One year I remember we gave an honorary degree to a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and when he was giving his brief speech they were joking and texting and ignoring him. We gave another honorary degree to a internationally award-winning mathematician and when she was giving her brilliant speech they were tossing tossing their hats in the air like frisbees.

46:46 But then, you have to understand, they were overwhelmed. Years of school, final exams, checking the boxes, the anxiety of the future, give them a little frivolity. They're overwhelmed. But then we gave an honorary degree to a man named Hugh Thompson. He was probably the least educated man on the platform. He had grown up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, just down the road. His family couldn't afford to send him to college, so he joined the Army, became a helicopter pilot. In March of 1963, he was on patrol in his helicopter, and he flew over the little village of My Lai in Vietnam. He looked down and saw an atrocity. American troops were opening fire on children and old people, killing them in the village and throwing them in a pit.

47:46 Most helicopter pilots would probably have said, war is hell and flown on. But Hugh Thompson put his helicopter down between the troops and the villagers, told his tail gunner, point the machine gun at our own troops. He was almost court-martial for that. He got out of the helicopter and confronted Lieutenant William Calley, who was in charge of the troops, and then he went down into the pit of death to see if there was anybody alive. He saved a little boy and a little girl. It was 30 years before the Army recognized what he had done and gave him an award for bravery. And when he stood there and his story was told, there was no tossing of hats and texting and joking. the graduates were still and quiet. And then he spoke.

48:39 And what Hugh Thompson said was, I don't have any fancy words like the others. I'll just tell you what my parents taught me when I was young. The words of Jesus, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And suddenly we were overwhelmed by the size of his courage. the breadth and length and height and depth of God's love and justice and mercy in that commandment. And it overwhelmed our overwhelmedness.

49:18 Theologian Christopher Morse has been thinking about this. He wrote a little book called The Difference Heaven Makes, in which he looked at all of the ways the word heaven is used in the New Testament, and he said, you know, for the most part in the New Testament, heaven is not a place where people go when they die. It's the place from which God comes to us. God speaks from heaven and acts from heaven. Heaven is a symbol for the fullness of God's life. And like waves crashing on the beach, the fullness of God's life breaks in. I want you to be filled, Paul wrote, with the fullness of God, to know the power that is at work in us, that performs abundantly, more than we could ever ask or imagine.

50:13 And it overwhelms our overwhelmedness, sometimes even in worship. Not every week, of course. Sometimes worship can be flat and ordinary. But occasionally, you know when, you know what I'm talking about, something breaks through and you're overwhelmed by the mystery and awe and majesty of God. Serene Jones, who is president of Union Seminary in Manhattan, and once taught at Yale, and she worshiped at a little church in New Haven. And she told one time about this little church had every Christmas a Christmas pageant, but it was not one with just the children in it. Everybody in the congregation was in their Christmas pageant, and not only the congregation, but people just connected to the work and ministries of the church.

51:08 One year, they asked Reggie, a man who slept on the front porch of the church every night, under the arch of the doorway to be the innkeeper at Bethlehem. And they asked a woman named Joyce, who was in a program for developmentally disabled people, to join the women's chorus and to sing the angels' song in the Christmas pageant. She didn't want to, didn't feel worthy to, didn't feel equipped to, but they encouraged her, and she did. So the night of the pageant came. Mary and Joseph and the donkey come down the center aisle and there is Reggie at the inn in Bethlehem. When they got close, Joseph spoke his line. We have traveled a long way. We are weary. We seek lodging. And Reggie said, sure, come on in.

52:02 That wasn't the way it was supposed to go. No room in the end. So Joseph puzzled, stepped back a step, and repeated his line. We have come a long way, and we are weary from our journey. We seek lodging. And Reggie said, I get it. Come on in. And it became clear to the congregation, as long as Reggie was the innkeeper, nobody was going to be homeless that night. And then the angels gathered above the shepherds in the field, and in the balcony the choir began to sing, Joy to the world, peace on earth, goodwill toward all. And then when the angel's song died out, you could still hear Joyce in a stage whisper say, I had no idea I could be an angel.

53:00 And the congregation was overwhelmed by the length and breadth and height and depth of the mercy and kindness and love of God. May you also be filled.